The Tests

I used RightMark3DSound v2.2 for these comparisons. First off, out of curiosity I played around with the Positioning Accuracy Test. The level of detail the X-Fi achieves in comparison to my Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 is incredible. EAX 4.0 can really push your sound hardware when it comes to positioning. The X-Fi was able to produce superior sound around walls, directionally, and rotating on various axis’s.

I am going to measure my SBLive 5.1 and my onboard Realtek AC97 audio vs. the Creative X-Fi in benchmarks that will test specific CPU usage during audio tests. This will show just how much effort the sound cards will put forth, and how much will be offloaded to your CPU. This is important to find out, because better sound cards should allow our CPUs to do less work processing audio, and more work processing various other things in-game, like physics, etc.

Using RightMark again, we test in DirectSound and compare the two cards and onboard. [Note for all comparisons I used EAX, as most gamers pretty much use that as a standard.]



The X-Fi really shines; we see how the CPU performs almost half the calculations with the X-Fi compared with the SBLive! 5.1 and almost one third compared with the Realtek onboard chip. Such a comparison should show us gamers that sound cards aren’t just for audio quality any more, they really do aid in overall system performance while gaming.

Now we will test some real world comparisons. Its great seeing this card handle the SB Live! in benchmarks and subjective sound quality, so let's see how it compares via in-game performance.

I achieved the following average FPS with the different audio devices using CS:Source and my computer as a testbed:
AMD Athlon64 3200+
NVIDIA GeForce7800GS
OCZ Platinum PC3200 (2x1GB)
maxed out detail levels on 1280x1024:



As you can see, there is a noticeable FPS increase just by changing the sound cards and upgrading to the X-Fi. It clearly isn't the difference between, say a GeForce 6xxx series and a 7xxx series, but it is still quite noticable and could be key to those of us trying to squeak out those last few frames per second.